Wednesday, December 12, 2007

More on Australia Rape Case

As reported yesterday, Queensland judge Sarah Bradley (pictured), who said the ten-year old "probably agreed" to the rapes, did not hand out a single day of jail time to any of the nine perpetrators, all of whom pled guilty. (Some of the assailants, who were minors, came from some of Queensland's most prominent Aboriginal families, and even 26-year-old Raymond Woolla, who had a prior rap sheet of child-sex offenses, was given a six-month suspended sentence. Bradley told Woolla in her sentencing statement, "If you get into any more trouble in the next year, you could end up in jail.")

Prosecutor Steve Carter described the rape in court as "childish experimentation" and further claimed that "I can't say it was consensual in the legal sense, but in the other - in the general sense, the non-legal sense, yes, it was." Carter also said that the rape was "all by arrangement." What Carter failed to mention is the ten-year-old in question was born with fetal alcohol syndrome.